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Shawn the Doc is correct I was not disagreeing with you. I took issue with the autistic spectrum being lumped in with standard psychological disorders. I have seen a tremendous amount of misinformation in the media regarding autism. There are more questions than answers in relation to the spectrum(the very definition of it is in a state of relative flux...with lines constantly being redefined). I also took issue with the indifferent parenting comment Doc. I am not looking for an argument here but that would be a pretty tough pill for a lot of Parents who dedicate their lives to their children's early intervention efforts in hoping And working toward and for a solution.

I will agree with your comments to the extent that it is an ongoing debate and topic of research. And clearly, the outcome of an impaired child despite the best efforts of truly dedicated parents is not only a tragedy, but it underscores the bitterness that would be expected to be directed towards anyone who attempted to correlate an impaired child (that was essentially "born that way") with indifferent parents.

However, that being said, I will stick by my assertion that there is a definitely strong connection between "Impaired parenting" and an "Impaired child".
Case in point..the topic of this thread. While the evidence is still being gathered, there appears to be a great deal of information which is basically labeling the shooter as a "troubled child/adolescent/young adult" and a mother who not only collected firearms (including assault rifles???) but who apparently regularly brought her "troubled son" to the range for target practice.

Impaired parenting? The evidence will be forthcoming, and perhaps at this point I have become too subjective to make further comments.

With more study, we might be able to learn things, and improve our society in numerous ways. It certainly wouldn't hurt to add to our body of knowledge about human beings.

Human beings are complex. And our minds are intricate mechanisms. I think the salient point is that a combination of efforts - scientific, educational, diagnostic, and perhaps legal, is something worth looking at.

Here's a personal observation: Maybe 25 years ago Michigan closed most of its mental hospitals. I was on the Michigan Bar's Committee on the Mentally Disabled, formed to advise the legislature regarding mental health laws at the time. Some patients were put into privatized group settings, and others were simply put out on the streets. At the same time, Michigan's legal system made involuntary commitment more difficult to obtain by concerned families.

This of course reduced access to the mental health system. And most of those who were simply released from hospital care that didn't make it into privately financed group homes simply became homeless, and wandered the streets.

This was not a good outcome, as far as I'm concerned. Often public policy and legal intentions, however much lip service is given to protecting rights, or saving the state money, create additional problems that are not desired by anyone. However desirable certain goals are, it doesn't improve the quality of life in a community for people to be homeless, and many of those folks had no ability to be anything else.

So it is with great care that we should tinker with mental health. In any case, studying the problem does not hurt, and what we learn may help save lives.

I have been thinking about the prevention aspect of this. And I'm sad to report that we will never have 100% prevention.

The problem is not the availability of weapons.We may be more efficient about it now, but humans have always had the capacity to kill, even when the only weapons available were our fists and rocks. Discussions about removing the weapons from society are moot. Several nations have tried and failed. 100% removal is not possible and there is some validity to the argument that it leaves the law-abiding even more vulnerable. It is also an impossible task. Criminals will keep their weapons no matter what law we pass - they are the tools of their trade. And the number of law-abiding citizens who will give up their weapons is highly debatable. Some will. Some will passively refuse, convincing themselves that since they are not a threat, their particular guns should not be taken - making them criminals on paper. Some will actively resist enforcement. The number of dead on both sides in those scenarios could easily outstrip the numbers of dead to this point at the hands of serial and spree killers. We cannot change this part: the guns, knives, poisons, fists and rocks are here. They will always be here.

The problem is not books, movies, TV or video games either. Depictions of violence have always been part of every society's story telling and entertainment. From the earliest bushmen telling the story of how a young hunter saved the tribe by killing a raiding tribe's scout to the slow-motion carnage of ridding the Earth of mutants, aliens and zombies. Violence is within all of us. And before you say you are immune to the urges, ask yourself what you would have done if you had a chance to confront any of the latest shooters mid-spree. I'll make it easier for you. Ask yourself what you would do to protect your child. Knowing that the violence is inside us, but we aren't all serial killers or spree-murderers proves that our total immersion in violence from all sides is not slowly nudging us all to become murderous. It is an easy reaction to blame the images around us, but it doesn't wash because with a world population of 6,973,738,433 (and counting), the incidences of murder and mass murder are still rare enough to make the news. My argument here is is that if the violence around us is the source of unleashing the violence within us, we would soon wipe ourselves out and societies would collapse. (not that I don't think we are headed that way eventually for much different reasons).

The problem cannot be solved by increasing security. Ask anyone who deals with security on a regular basis - policemen, insurance adjusters, the military - if security can ever be 100%. You can increase the difficulty of violent interaction, but only by degrees. The answer only approaches yes with complete and utter person to person isolation. Only when every human is locked away, unable to interact with any other human in any way will there be anything like 100% security and safety from each other. Note that we would still be vulnerable to lots of other things. So, short of complete interpersonal isolation, each increasing degree of interpersonal contact increases the chances of violence and decreases security.

The concept of hardening one target to violence by adding more and more security necessarily weakens all other nearby targets. After our home was broken into, we added more security. Our goal was simple. Make our house less of a target when compared to other houses. That puts the onus on both the neighbor and the criminal to respond. Smart neighborhoods band together and make the whole neighborhood less attractive to criminals. The same concepts apply to hardening our schools against gunmen. What about the mall? The stadium? The PARKS! Hardening targets only shifts the danger to new targets. And universal hardening imprisons the innocent. Anything short is not 100% prevention. The gunman at this school bypassed the locked doors by shooting out a window. It was harder for him to gain entrance, but not impossible.

So, the weapons are here and will remain so. The targets are impossible to make 100% safe. What is left.

The shooter in this case, and in almost all of the most recent cases, planned this event. He interacted with people during this planing. If even one person had seen the signs or detected a shift in behavior, perhaps this incident and others, could have been prevented in it's entirety. Please understand that this next bit should not be construed as blame - it is conjecture. The mother had hobbies, among them sport shooting. If there came a time when her son showed any tendency towards violent actions, what should have been the disposition of her personal firearms? Locked up securely? Certainly. Removed from the home entirely? Perhaps. I conjecture this only as an example of what i feel our ultimate path forward to be.

Recognition, prevention, treatment.

We used to house our mentally ill. Many of the institutions were cruel places - prisons for the mentally ill with abuse and neglect. Now we medicate them until they are stable and then return them to society. With poor to no followup systems in place, many are soon off their meds by choice, unfounded reasoning or poverty and right back into their illness. If persons who are at or near a mental break who are or reasonably could expect to be violent were monitored with the same attention we give to other know dangerous situations, how different would this problem be? After the fact we consistently find that the shooters were troubled, that there was a triggering stressor, that they had made threats to themselves or others. I'm sure there were just as many who were on the path to violence and gave no apparent warning signs. And I believe that is the true difficult task at hand.

But what we are going to get instead is feel-good legislation. The laws which will be proposed and probably passed in the wake of this last shooting will be reactionary and visceral. Most likely they will seek to eliminate the weapons. We tried that once. The Assault Weapons Ban of the 80s banned whole classes of firearms and limited magazine capacity. The result - the law abiding had fewer guns, but the number of guns in America did not go down. Crime in America did not go down. Net effect on murder - zero. But people felt better.

We don't need a visceral response/ We don't need an emotional response. We need a true reasoned response. We are not going to get it.

A more reasoned response might be to control weapons better - not by banning whole classes of them - shooters would just shift their interest to the unbanned classes. But what if we expanded the background checks to include the criminal and mental stability of everyone in a gun buyer's household, not just the buyer. No sales to wives of felons, (sorry Mr Liddy), no sales to parents or spouses of mentally ill without strict lockup requirements. (The current regulations for unannounced inspections linked to Class III ownership could be a model for that one.)

While we are controlling the weapons, we could harden the most precious of targets. Schools become prisons. Schoolyards get high masonry walls with concertina wire and guard towers. Buses are armored and get armed security guards. Go ahead laugh. I can see this happening.

Any person who threatens another in any way is institutionalized. Speech and demeanor become as microscopically scrutinized as though we are continuously going through security at the airport.

Let's not forget our culture of violence. Every book, TV show, movie, video game, newspaper, etc. becomes one of the few episodes of Leave It To Beaver or My Three Sons where there was not even the insinuation of discord.

And we'd still miss detecting most of the shooters until it was too late.

I don't know how to fix it. I just know that it sucks.

edit - I posted this before I read Les's posts above. My apologies if I seem to have covered much of the same ground.

I took my daughter to school this morning. I stood there in the cold with my 5-year-old and watched the Mom's as they were catching up with one another - laughing - drinking their coffee from overpriced, thermally superior, coffee mugs - getting ready for another week. It was business as usual. The children were also carefree - also laughing - screaming with delight as they saw each of their friends pull up. No doubt the parents have shielded their children from the news - as I have. I was struggling to maintain my composure the whole time - wondering how so many people could be so casual this day. Didn't they hold their kids a little closer, all weekend, like I did? Perhaps the other parents were struggling as well -- but were doing a much better job of it than I was.

I asked myself this question... "Do I gather up my child, take her home, huddle in the corner of our home, and arrive, safely, eventually, at death? Or do I accept the risks, swallow my fear, and choose to live a way of life so many have died to defend?" I even wondered if carrying my gun more often (legally, of course) was the right answer, despite the fact that I am repulsed at the sight of it. I will most certainly never relinquish my ability... my right... to keep and bear arms. It is the very thing (IMO) that ensures we remain a government of the people, by the people. But at what cost? If I relinquish my right will it finally bring an end to the mistreatment of our precious children in this country? The world?

Last night I watched President Obama's speech in Newtown on YouTube. As he read the names of those beautiful little kids and the teachers who tried to protect them, I lost it. Not just because of the horror they experienced in their last moments, not just for the unspeakable pain their parents must now endure, but because there appears to be no end to the depravity of humanity. Globally, the horror of Shady Hook is just another story in a long line of atrocities - regardless of the weapons used to commit them. And that begs a greater question for me; questions that go well beyond the argument for free will. But... we cannot discuss religion here.

My bottom line: The only thing standing between the wolves of the world and my daughter is me. All I have to do now is figure out how best to do that job. That will be no small feat. Shielding her from the real world is not the answer. At least for today, for me, giving total control to our elected officials (such that we can no longer guarantee we remain a government of the people, by the people) is not the answer either.

Thats exactly what i meant.We dont know anything about USA.Thats why i asked about the weapons law.Many just say people in USA have weapons without any permits or restrictions.

All sales of any kind of firearm from a dealer to a citizen are subject to a Federal background check. That is true for all long guns. The sales of hand guns fall under the same requirement with additional restrictions which vary from state to state. Additional restrictions may include waiting periods, training requirements, storage requirements and limitations on how many firearms may be purchased in a certain time period (example: 1 gun per month). some states apply the same restrictions to long guns as well.

18 is the general cutoff for long guns.
21 is the general cutoff for handguns.

At the moment, single shot firearms and semi-automatic firearms are not treated any differently. There was a Federal 'assault weapons ban' in the 80s which banned some semiautomatic long guns based on what was ultimately cosmetic appointments (they appeared more deadly than firearms of the exact same capabilities which were not banned). Magazine capacity was limited to a maximum of 10 rounds with the same law. The law had a 'sunset' provision which allowed it to expire after 10 years. The Federal legislators could have renewed it or made it permanent at the time of the sunset, but did not under overwhelming pressure by gun owners pointing to overwhelming evidence that the law did nothing to reduce or deter gun violence.

Fully automatic firearms (machine guns) have been extremely closely regulated since 1934. There is constant reference to them by the media as though they are in the hands of every gun owner and criminal - without any basis in fact.

Today, the airways are flooded with the visceral reaction I posted about above. there is a renewed cry for another 'assault weapons' ban. I see it as likely because Federal and State governments find it easier to demonize the gun than to deal with the real causes of crime, serial murders and spree shooting.

Those who do not read history (and those who have read it and dismissed it) are doomed to repeat it.

I have been thinking about the prevention aspect of this. And I'm sad to report that we will never have 100% prevention.

The problem is not the availability of weapons.We may be more efficient about it now, but humans have always had the capacity to kill, even when the only weapons available were our fists and rocks. Discussions about removing the weapons from society are moot. Several nations have tried and failed. 100% removal is not possible and there is some validity to the argument that it leaves the law-abiding even more vulnerable. It is also an impossible task. Criminals will keep their weapons no matter what law we pass - they are the tools of their trade. And the number of law-abiding citizens who will give up their weapons is highly debatable. Some will. Some will passively refuse, convincing themselves that since they are not a threat, their particular guns should not be taken - making them criminals on paper. Some will actively resist enforcement. The number of dead on both sides in those scenarios could easily outstrip the numbers of dead to this point at the hands of serial and spree killers. We cannot change this part: the guns, knives, poisons, fists and rocks are here. They will always be here.

The problem is not books, movies, TV or video games either. Depictions of violence have always been part of every society's story telling and entertainment. From the earliest bushmen telling the story of how a young hunter saved the tribe by killing a raiding tribe's scout to the slow-motion carnage of ridding the Earth of mutants, aliens and zombies. Violence is within all of us. And before you say you are immune to the urges, ask yourself what you would have done if you had a chance to confront any of the latest shooters mid-spree. I'll make it easier for you. Ask yourself what you would do to protect your child. Knowing that the violence is inside us, but we aren't all serial killers or spree-murderers proves that our total immersion in violence from all sides is not slowly nudging us all to become murderous. It is an easy reaction to blame the images around us, but it doesn't wash because with a world population of 6,973,738,433 (and counting), the incidences of murder and mass murder are still rare enough to make the news. My argument here is is that if the violence around us is the source of unleashing the violence within us, we would soon wipe ourselves out and societies would collapse. (not that I don't think we are headed that way eventually for much different reasons).

The problem cannot be solved by increasing security. Ask anyone who deals with security on a regular basis - policemen, insurance adjusters, the military - if security can ever be 100%. You can increase the difficulty of violent interaction, but only by degrees. The answer only approaches yes with complete and utter person to person isolation. Only when every human is locked away, unable to interact with any other human in any way will there be anything like 100% security and safety from each other. Note that we would still be vulnerable to lots of other things. So, short of complete interpersonal isolation, each increasing degree of interpersonal contact increases the chances of violence and decreases security.

The concept of hardening one target to violence by adding more and more security necessarily weakens all other nearby targets. After our home was broken into, we added more security. Our goal was simple. Make our house less of a target when compared to other houses. That puts the onus on both the neighbor and the criminal to respond. Smart neighborhoods band together and make the whole neighborhood less attractive to criminals. The same concepts apply to hardening our schools against gunmen. What about the mall? The stadium? The PARKS! Hardening targets only shifts the danger to new targets. And universal hardening imprisons the innocent. Anything short is not 100% prevention. The gunman at this school bypassed the locked doors by shooting out a window. It was harder for him to gain entrance, but not impossible.

So, the weapons are here and will remain so. The targets are impossible to make 100% safe. What is left.

The shooter in this case, and in almost all of the most recent cases, planned this event. He interacted with people during this planing. If even one person had seen the signs or detected a shift in behavior, perhaps this incident and others, could have been prevented in it's entirety. Please understand that this next bit should not be construed as blame - it is conjecture. The mother had hobbies, among them sport shooting. If there came a time when her son showed any tendency towards violent actions, what should have been the disposition of her personal firearms? Locked up securely? Certainly. Removed from the home entirely? Perhaps. I conjecture this only as an example of what i feel our ultimate path forward to be.

Recognition, prevention, treatment.

We used to house our mentally ill. Many of the institutions were cruel places - prisons for the mentally ill with abuse and neglect. Now we medicate them until they are stable and then return them to society. With poor to no followup systems in place, many are soon off their meds by choice, unfounded reasoning or poverty and right back into their illness. If persons who are at or near a mental break who are or reasonably could expect to be violent were monitored with the same attention we give to other know dangerous situations, how different would this problem be? After the fact we consistently find that the shooters were troubled, that there was a triggering stressor, that they had made threats to themselves or others. I'm sure there were just as many who were on the path to violence and gave no apparent warning signs. And I believe that is the true difficult task at hand.

But what we are going to get instead is feel-good legislation. The laws which will be proposed and probably passed in the wake of this last shooting will be reactionary and visceral. Most likely they will seek to eliminate the weapons. We tried that once. The Assault Weapons Ban of the 80s banned whole classes of firearms and limited magazine capacity. The result - the law abiding had fewer guns, but the number of guns in America did not go down. Crime in America did not go down. Net effect on murder - zero. But people felt better.

We don't need a visceral response/ We don't need an emotional response. We need a true reasoned response. We are not going to get it.

A more reasoned response might be to control weapons better - not by banning whole classes of them - shooters would just shift their interest to the unbanned classes. But what if we expanded the background checks to include the criminal and mental stability of everyone in a gun buyer's household, not just the buyer. No sales to wives of felons, (sorry Mr Liddy), no sales to parents or spouses of mentally ill without strict lockup requirements. (The current regulations for unannounced inspections linked to Class III ownership could be a model for that one.)

While we are controlling the weapons, we could harden the most precious of targets. Schools become prisons. Schoolyards get high masonry walls with concertina wire and guard towers. Buses are armored and get armed security guards. Go ahead laugh. I can see this happening.

Any person who threatens another in any way is institutionalized. Speech and demeanor become as microscopically scrutinized as though we are continuously going through security at the airport.

Let's not forget our culture of violence. Every book, TV show, movie, video game, newspaper, etc. becomes one of the few episodes of Leave It To Beaver or My Three Sons where there was not even the insinuation of discord.

And we'd still miss detecting most of the shooters until it was too late.

I don't know how to fix it. I just know that it sucks.

edit - I posted this before I read Les's posts above. My apologies if I seem to have covered much of the same ground.

You nailed it, in essence. In the mental health field, all providers and all who interact with the mentally ill must take a course in CRPI....depending on the venue, the acronym may change...but the initials stand for Crisis Recognition, Prevention, Intervention. In that order...first recognize the pending or escalating problem. Then try to Prevent it via Intervention.

I guess this is where my prior concept of impaired parenting comes into play. The parents are those who are best positioned to engage in CRPI with their offspring. Not to paint with an overly broad brush...but the preliminary evidence would indicate that this mother actually may have facilitated the problems by taking her "problem child" son to the target range so he could become an expert marksman. Sorry...but to me, that is a hobby and a privilege you give to a kid who doesn't have a lot of emotional baggage...not to a kid with problems already well documented. Apparantly the mother had already had run ins with the school district and was home-schooling her son. So, give him guns as a hobby. Go figure.

You nailed it, in essence. In the mental health field, all providers and all who interact with the mentally ill must take a course in CRPI....depending on the venue, the acronym may change...but the initials stand for Crisis Recognition, Prevention, Intervention. In that order...first recognize the pending or escalating problem. Then try to Prevent it via Intervention.

I guess this is where my prior concept of impaired parenting comes into play. The parents are those who are best positioned to engage in CRPI with their offspring. Not to paint with an overly broad brush...but the preliminary evidence would indicate that this mother actually may have facilitated the problems by taking her "problem child" son to the target range so he could become an expert marksman. Sorry...but to me, that is a hobby and a privilege you give to a kid who doesn't have a lot of emotional baggage...not to a kid with problems already well documented. Apparantly the mother had already had run ins with the school district and was home-schooling her son. So, give him guns as a hobby. Go figure.

Thanks, Doc. But we both know that this will not be the course of action. It requires our society to work harder at things far too many would shirk off on the government.

Shawn...I think he's more critical of my comments, and more in agreement with yours. I will agree that autism is a pervasive developmental disorder, but I will disagree with the comment that it is purely a neurodevelopmental condition. There is copious evidence and research to support the fact that there are non-genetic (environmental) markers in many cases, and there is still quite a bit that is unknown with regard to the etiology of this condition. As Shawn stated, if we find out in 10 years that autism is statistically more prevalent in households that used a certain type of toothpaste, it will demonstrate the huge array of possibilities that can be attempted to be accounted for.

Doc.. over my lifetime, I have known three women with children who had Autistic/Asbergers syndrome.. They had several traits in common. One they all had above average I.Q.'s Two, they got bored with any mate they had and used any excuse to move on . Three, they used babysitters excessively and liked being a popular mom down at the nightclub. One that I knew even looked like Casey Anthony.. Now.. Im NOT saying that this is the cause of of any of it, Im sure there are autisic children that have 2 loving caring well adjusted parents ..But boy they were in denial at first and wanted their kid to be in the general population at school.. Is this me being stero typical or is their any correlation? I have always believed that when one has a child...The party is OVER.

Doc.. over my lifetime, I have known three women with children who had Autistic/Asbergers syndrome.. They had several traits in common. One they all had above average I.Q.'s Two, they got bored with any mate they had and used any excuse to move on . Three, they used babysitters excessively and liked being a popular mom down at the nightclub. One that I knew even looked like Casey Anthony.. Now.. Im NOT saying that this is the cause of of any of it, Im sure there are autisic children that have 2 loving caring well adjusted parents ..But boy they were in denial at first and wanted their kid to be in the general population at school.. Is this me being stero typical or is their any correlation? I have always believed that when one has a child...The party is OVER.

No.

There is no correlation whatsover. You can be a great parent or a terrible parent it's not going to have ANY bearing on whether a child is born with a form of Autism.

Just curious... Do you guys (in the US) spell Aspergers differently? I noticed you and Docbennett both refer to it as 'Asbergers'. No biggie, just curious.

As my statistics professor taught me many many years ago...it does, when the correlation is 1.0. A correlation of 1.0 = "de facto causation"

You can never infer causation from correlation analysis...but, as the .r approaches 1.0 and exceeds .9....you have virtual causation, although you can never actually state that Variable A results in Effect B.

I spend much of my day performing distribution analytics, dynamic correlation analysis, hedging and tail risk truncation functions. Correlations are limited by a wide degree of factors the most common include the impact of outliers, the potential for spurious correlation, the confusion of exogenous and endogenous variables, and the limitations of correlation to measure relationships beyond the linear. To avoid some of the problems with simple linear regression you can attempt to use multiple regression in which lagged terms, control variables, and nonlinear terms can all be included as independent variables to better specify the relationship...however I would be extremely careful with the notion of assuming de facto causation. Assumption in my world is the mother of all ****ups.

In addition have I mentioned how much I hate the tendancy of gaussian based functions to creep up everywhere? especially where they don't belong?